IS GAMIFICATION TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION?

Does gamification, in education, generate the talent needed for New Zealand to produce knowledge creation and innovation or does gamification actually entrench the prevailing industrial revolution education paradigm, creating a bigger problem?

With emerging economies usurping New Zealand, on international innovation standings, attention in the industrial and education system, is increasingly drawn to the quality of 21st century that education can and does offer. The common complaint underpins an ever diminishing lack of capable and digitally equipped talent being generated and supplied into the industrial system. The problem is compounded by fear of tackling the legacy education philosophy and a shortage of educators with digital skills.

The lure of adopt “Gamification” and or “game-based” digital education, may seem like an obvious Innovation and education strategy for developing the 21st century skills in learners. With the increasing promotion from commercial interests, creating the accessibility of gamified education tools/games, thus may appear a viable mechanism for 21st Century digital education strategy. As a result the gamification value propositions promote the ease of professional development for embedding new forms of teaching practice to digitally engage and motivate students.

The proposition is that students harness the motivational power of games where they apply “skills” and “thinking” in artificial situations. This presupposes that knowledge creation is later constructed by transposing these artificially generated capabilities, to, again later, solve real-world problems. The appearance of learning is said to occur because students are glued to monitors, seemingly enjoying interacting, "thinking" and being engaged. The assumption therefore, can be drawn that as a “teaching method”, some integrity exists in the level of psychological development attained by each student.

CRITICS:

Critics of gamification aruge no new knowledge nor the thinking processes needed are authentically generated or constructed for real world applicability with game based and, in many cases, "gameífied" education. To this effect, Amabile et al (1986) started a field of research which showed that gamified reward mechanisms on task functions in workplaces and education settings actually killed creativity and innovation.

As one example, 23 participants, as professional artists, were asked to participate. In a controlled environment where no participant knew of the experiment, those that were rewarded generated artwork with little creativity and technical skill, as they were attracted to the reward or pretence, not the development opportunity, task or quality. Amabile (1986) pursued the study further proving that, as subjects of the remarkable experiment, the participants who were not rewarded provided significantly more creative, high quality and skill-visible work, than those who were gamified.

On the surface, gamification may well appear to be a solution to the 21st Century education problem! Or, does gamification actually represent dangers for innovation found echoed through the carthasis of the legacy industrial revolution education paradigm....?

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